Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
4.2.1.1 Sub-project Internal Communication
Early on in the acceptance process a kick-off is organised. Sub-project management
has been informed about the functional contents of the acceptance object and the
most important milestones. From the acceptance object and content the necessary
professional competences of the testers can be deduced. These are quite often
people who have participated in drafting the functional specifications. Project
management addresses the responsible department heads and asks for the tempo-
rary release for the duration of acceptance testing of the identified resources or
alternative persons deemed to be useful for the task. In this way the fist members of
the kick-off from the business units are to be selected.
Prior to kick-off acceptance management and its counterpart on the supplier side
should consult each other to fix communication rules for the event. They have to
agree in particular upon possible critical stress situations to be expected. This
obviously depends strongly on the type of functions to be tested: interfaces, changes
to the data architecture, chaining of batch runs etc. After clarification of these
boundary conditions the kick-off can take place—normally several weeks before
the start of the acceptance procedures themselves.
All persons carrying at least some responsibilities, sub-project management,
contact persons from the supplier during acceptance tests, other specialists and—
if possible—a representative of request management as well as representatives of
the ordering party either from business units or the IT line organisation should be
present. During the kick-off the following issues have to be clarified:
• Allocation of responsible testers to individual functions.
• Test data required (dumps from the productive systems or synthetic data),
• Interface runs
• Business processes to be tested—test scripts (to be drafted or distributed),
• User access rights
• Test sequence scheduling
• Patch cycle
• Review cycle.
The results are to be recorded in a protocol and to be communicated to the
participants and the hierarchy. Sometimes there will be an additional intermediate
meeting prior to acceptance tests or working groups to work out specific details
such as test scripts etc.
During the acceptance tests regular reviews take place. As already mentioned
above they are used to
• Prioritise errors
• Schedule patch deliveries
• Adjust the schedule
• Work out issues to be clarified
• Formulate new change requests.
